Easier to change the world if you go there

A South Korean monk pours water on a small statue of Buddha during a service to celebrate Buddha's birthday at Jogye temple in Seoul.

A South Korean monk pours water on a small statue of Buddha during a service to celebrate Buddha's birthday at Jogye temple in Seoul.

Photo: Lee Jin-man, Associated Press

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Deoksugung Palace in Seoul, South Korea.

Deoksugung Palace in Seoul, South Korea.

Photo: Kolten Parker /San Antonio Express-News

Easier to change the world if you go there

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Maybe it’s a matter of self-preservation, but I’ve long since lost track of how many different animals I’ve eaten.

Spending time exploring other countries and other cultures comes with the opportunity to try new things — and often those things once crawled, slithered, shimmied or hopped. Then they ended up on a plate. Nothing endangered, but there have been kangaroo, ants, fruit bat, alligator, ostrich, tentacles of various kinds, and a tiny, crunchy bird in Kyoto that may have been a sparrow. Or a really small buzzard.

It’s extremely improbable, however, that if given the chance I would eat a dog. And if I did try it, I wouldn’t tell anyone. It’s not the whole “man’s best friend” thing. It’s mostly because people here are emotional about domesticated animals. Extremely emotional.

After a feature that ran in this section recommending destinations to consider during the coming year (“Where to Go in 2017,” Jan. 8), we received some mail from readers about our choice of South Korea.

“Its horrific dog and cat meat trade needs to be abolished before Korea is favorably advertised. … Until such time as these barbaric practices are abolished, such places should be boycotted,” a reader wrote.

Another added, “I don’t know if you do your homework on these countries but South Korea is a vile, barbaric country. It is the home of 17,000 dog meat farms …”

While I respect people having strong opinions, I can’t agree with the approach — boycotting an entire country.

More by Spud Hilton

Never mind that calling all 50 million South Koreans vile and barbaric because of one issue that involves a fraction of the population is misguided — demonizing an entire country, an entire culture, an entire religion is never a good idea and rarely leads to better understanding. (And never mind that if there’s a list of countries that might be boycotted for what other cultures deem vile and barbaric practices, the United States would be firmly on it.)

What’s important is that you can’t have change without negotiation, and sometimes the best form of negotiation is travel.

Travel is not just about getting on a plane to go see a few museums, take selfies in front of monuments and eat at the place some food blogger loved. Travel is taking your comfort zone, your beliefs and your perceptions and reconciling them, through personal experience, with the standards, the beliefs and the perceptions of another culture. Everyone and everything you encounter or observe is part of the negotiation. Everyone you talk to is part of the process, although travel is a negotiation even if you don’t speak to anyone.

We negotiate for context. We negotiate for insight. We negotiate for understanding when we have little to begin with. Sometimes, we negotiate language, other times it’s food, or money, or directions or recommendations or insight about life in a place you’ve never been.

In the same way that negotiating without compromise in the real world leads only to impasse, the cultural negotiation of travel stalemates only if travelers are not open to changing their perceptions. Or if they don’t go.

For decades, U.S. citizens who traveled to Cuba and met its people had the only negotiations — of any kind — that took place between entire populations that are 90 miles apart.

It’s that negotiation that changes us, changes others and changes the world. Unlike in the negotiations of high finance, however, everyone profits — whether they feel like it or not. We don’t always agree, but we always learn, even in disagreement. And learning is always enrichment.

In his 1961 inauguration, President John F. Kennedy offered a quote not typically attributed to travel. “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”